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December 24, 2012

“On December 23, 1981, Reagan held a private meeting at the White House with the Polish ambassador, Romuald Spasowski. That very day, Spasowski and his wife defected…

As Spasowski’s wife wept, the ambassador said to Reagan: “May I ask you a favor, Mr. President? Would you light a candle and put in the window tonight for the people of Poland?”

…In the speech, he connected the spirit of the season with events in Poland: “For a thousand years,” he told his fellow Americans, “Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.”

…said Reagan. “Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished.”

The candles, said Reagan, would also shine as a Christmas reminder of our blessings and “solemn obligation” to “the God who guides us.”…

Yet, there was another story behind the speech that isn’t remembered, but is likewise revealing. Reagan had started the speech with a wonderful opening about the reason for the season: the Christ child…

But, alas, …the next day, those opening lines to Reagan’s speech were removed from the transcript printed in the newspaper.

December 20, 2012

No matter how much tougher we make our gun laws we’ll never prevent future tragedies like last week’s murder of those innocents in Newtown, Conn.

We won’t stop future Newtowns if we outlaw every military-style assault weapon in America.

We won’t stop future Auroras if we outlaw semi-automatic pistols or rifles, or mandate that no magazine clip can ever hold more than 10 rounds.

We won’t stop future Virginia Techs if we make it tougher to buy a gun legally or if we shut down all gun shows on the continent for the rest of time.

Let’s get real. America has an estimated 300 million guns. We could make owning a gun a capital crime today and by tomorrow 100 million guns would be hidden in our closets and buried in our backyards.

Good people, bad people and crazy people would still have access to tens of millions of guns and the ammunition they need. All the strict laws Mayor Bloomberg or Sen. Feinstein can dream up won’t change that.

Some of the strictest gun laws in the country don’t stop the gang-bangers of Chicago from slaughtering each other by the hundreds each year over drug turf.

Connecticut already had tough gun laws. So did Norway, where last year an evil extremist used guns and bombs to randomly kill 77 people — mostly teenagers.

To politicians, banning all semi-automatic weapons or large magazines in guns sounds like a good solution to stop mass murders, but it isn’t.

Those laws might keep the death toll in the single digits, but they won’t stop another killing spree like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary from occurring in the first place.

I want to prevent mass murders from happening in schools, not merely reduce their number of victims. I’m not willing to accept six dead first-graders instead of 20. I’m not willing to accept a single dead teacher or principal or schoolchild.

And the only way to bring the death toll down to zero in our schools is to put trained armed guards in every one of them.

Not a retired policeman or a fat guy in a cheap uniform who sits in a chair all day. A real guard with a real loaded gun that he or she knows how to use and is authorized to shoot.

It could be a local police officer or a private security guard. And taxpayers would be willing to pay the price for knowing their kids were being protected by more than security cameras and locked doors.

Security is never foolproof. When my father was shot in 1981, he was the most protected person in America, surrounded by heavily armed and trained bodyguards.

The disturbed man who tried to kill him didn’t use an assault rifle or a semi-automatic to carry out his plan. Before he was wrestled to the ground, he got off six shots in 1.7 seconds — with a revolver.

I’ll never forget what Mike Luty, the head of the Secret Service detail who was with me the day my father was shot, said to me when I asked, “How can you allow this to happen?” Luty said, “We train 24/7, but we can’t stop the crazies.”

We can’t stop every crazy in America who is intent on committing mass murder, either, but we can try. We need to fix our mental health system so it’s better able to identify potential killers before they kill, and we need to find ways parents can provide help to their kids over 18 without needing a court order.

But no matter what we do, evil people, crazy people and troubled suicidal young white males will always have access to guns and they’ll plan their lethal attacks in secret and carry them out.

More gun control and gun-free zones won’t stop them, but guns will. Putting armed guards — with loaded weapons — in our schools is the only sure way we can keep our future mass murderers from hurting any more of our innocent children.

December 18, 2012

As President Obama and Democrats urge Republicans to increase taxes, liberals curiously invoke the name of Ronald Reagan, the ultimate tax-cutting Republican. They insist that even Reagan was willing to compromise with Democrats on tax increases; thus, John Boehner and Republicans should as well. In truth, this is (at best) a false parallel.

It is correct that Ronald Reagan occasionally compromised on certain tax increases, as he did in 1982. He did so in exchange for promised spending cuts from Democrats that (not surprisingly) never materialized, to his great regret. Reagan would constantly point back to this broken promise by Democrats.

More importantly, however, President Reagan never budged on income taxes. He flatly refused to increase income taxes, which is what President Obama demands of Republicans right now. Reagan understood that not all taxes, and thus not all tax increases, were equal.

For insight into Ronald Reagan’s thinking, consider what he did in 1981, when faced with a stagnant economy: At his California ranch on August 13, 1981, Reagan, working with a Democratic House and Republican Senate, secured a 25% across-the-board reduction in income tax rates over a three-year period beginning in October 1981. Eventually, through this and later cuts, the upper income-tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%.

After a slow start through 1982-83, the stimulus effect of the tax cuts was extraordinary, sparking a huge peacetime economic expansion. The “Reagan Boom” produced not only prosperity but—along with the Soviet collapse that he worked to precipitate—helped generate budget surpluses in the 1990s.

And contrary to the history that liberals continue to rewrite, the Reagan tax cuts did not decrease the revenue to the U.S. Treasury. To the contrary, tax revenues under Reagan rose from $599 billion in 1981 to nearly $1 trillion in 1989. The problem was that outlays (i.e., government spending) all along exceeded revenues, soaring from $678 billion in 1981 to $1.143 trillion in 1989.

The cause of the Reagan deficits—bear in mind that Reagan inherited a chronic deficit—was the decline in revenue from the 1982-83 recession and (as is always the case) excessive federal spending.

Spending has long been, and still remains, the primary reason for our fiscal crisis. This has been especially true since the massive growth of the federal government begun in the 1960s by LBJ’s Great Society.

Proof of this is as easy as Googling the words “historical tables deficit.” You will see two go-to sources for budget data: “OMB historical tables” and “CBO historical tables.” “OMB” is Office of Management and Budget. “CBO” is Congressional Budget Office. To keep it simple, look at the data from OMB, President Obama’s own budget office. At the OMB link is Table 1.1, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789-2016,” an official report of all federal spending since the founding of the republic.

A close read of that chart offers a stunning display in fiscal irresponsibility. As the first two columns show, receipts (i.e., revenues) and outlays (i.e., expenditures) moved up and down throughout the first roughly 180 years of our history. In 1965, however, something historically perverse began: Spending started increasing every single year, without exception, into the Obama presidency, from 1965-2009. A slight decrease came only in 2010, but then spending promptly ratcheted right back up, and remains on a steady upward trajectory through 2017.

There are few constants in the universe: gravity is one, the sun is another. Add another: spending by Washington; it goes up every year.

Worse, in 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress responded to the slow economy with a gigantic spending infusion: an $800-billion “stimulus” package that further exploded our record deficit/debt.

In short, this is why Republicans should not agree to Democrats’ demands for tax increases. This nation has a spending problem—a grave one—not a tax-revenue problem. Our problem today is reckless big government.

At his 1981 inaugural, Ronald Reagan, referring to the economic crisis he faced, declared that “government is not the solution … government is the problem.”

Just days after his inaugural, Barack Obama professed the opposite: “[A]t this particular moment, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs.”

Barack Obama is the anti-Reagan.

To repeat: Ronald Reagan never budged on marginal income-tax rates. He decreased them, big-time. Barack Obama is demanding that they be increased. Ronald Reagan, we suspect, would be fully supportive of current Republicans holding their ground on tax rates—especially given our federal government’s unparalleled inability to control its reckless spending.

December 15, 2012

December 13, 2012

All those union thugs who were rioting in Michigan Tuesday were angry about the wrong thing.

They were demonstrating — which in union-speak means breaking things and punching people — against Michigan’s decision to become a right-to-work state.

If you believe the union spin, or the mainstream liberal media’s spin, or the Obama spin, which all come from the same propaganda factory, that means Michigan no longer cares about workers, the right to organize, living wages, etc., etc.

But what Michigan’s new law really means is that the voters and a majority of the politicians in the state have miraculously decided that a citizen’s freedom of choice should extend to the freedom to be able to choose not to join a union.

What a concept.

It’s a great step forward for a troubled state that has seen its signature industry crippled to the point of near extinction by unions that had too much power over the lives of workers, American carmakers, politicians and the economy.

If those union thugs and their allies in the Democrat Party really had a clue, they would have been demonstrating — peacefully, if that’s possible — against what has happened to the once-great, but now pathetic, city of Detroit.

The statistics are staggering. Detroit — a union town if America ever made one — is a socialist hell on wheels.

Its city government is broke and nearly $50 million in the red, in part because it pays $1.08 in benefits to municipal workers and retirees for every $1 it pays in salaries.

Its population has fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 700,000 as of 2011, and too many of the Detroiters who are left don’t pay taxes, don’t form traditional two-parent families, don’t have jobs and aren’t interested in having one.

Of the roughly 224,000 residents who actually have a job, only 190,000 work in the private sector. A third of the populace is on food stamps. Oh, and 99,000 of Detroit’s 363,000 housing units are vacant.

Welcome to Obamaville — and the future Obama America.

If Michigan’s union thugs want to demonstrate about something beyond their own economic interests as seen through the lens of union fundraising, they might try raising a fist to the sorry state of education in Detroit.

Among students in city schools recently exiting eighth grade, only 7 percent are “proficient” in reading and only 4 percent are “proficient” in math.

Maybe the unions are happy with those shameful numbers, because they will be guaranteed a steady supply of uneducated kids who are only qualified to join a union.

But what were all those parents doing, supporting the union thugs and excusing thousands of schoolteachers who took the day off in solidarity? Those parents, if they had a common-sense proficiency in double digits, would be protesting the lousy education their kids are getting.

It’s interesting to see the left go wild in the streets to protest Michigan’s giant step for greater worker freedom.

It seems the left only wants you to have freedom of choice when you’re pregnant. After you give birth to the child, it’s those on the left — not the right — that want to deny your freedom to choose, whether it’s a school for your kid, the size of your soft drink, or to be in a union.

Michigan is going the right way — the opposite of the Obama Way that has doubled America’s homeless population to 636,000 and jacked up our food stamp population to 47 million.

Detroit has been destroyed by its own bad governments and the kind of federal policies Obama wants to expand. It may be beyond saving, except for growing crops where neighborhoods once were.

But Michigan has taken a dramatic step toward resurrecting its industrial economy. It’s no longer a union-made state.

It’s a state where freedom of choice extends to people who will no longer be forced to join a union or pay dues to a bunch of thugs who’ll spend it to elect more presidents like the one we’re stuck with now.

December 6, 2012

Once upon a time — in 1988 and 1998 to be exact — the United States was the best country for a baby to be born and raised in, at least according to The Economist magazine.

But the 2013 edition of the magazine’s “where-to-be-born” index has us down at No. 16 — tied with Germany and one spot ahead of the United Arab Emirates.

Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark — nice countries but not exactly world famous as destinations for millions of people seeking opportunity — are ranked 1 through 5.

The Economist’s annual ranking tries to quantify what country “will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.”

It crunches and weighs the numbers for 11 indicators — everything from geography and demography to GDP per capita, the cost of living and future economic growth prospects. And, unfortunately for the United States, it weighs government debt.

The Economist doesn’t factor a debt-related reason America will likely continue to slide in these rankings — no one today has any confidence in our political leaders to solve our economic problems.

Our economy is stuck on a reef. Growth is too low. The prospects of a real recovery coming anytime soon are dim and getting dimmer, not brighter.

It’s so bad, even illegal aliens are losing confidence in America and leaving the country. And Citigroup just announced it is laying off 11,000 employees. Obviously, its bosses don’t have much hope for a better future, either.

Back in the 1980s, we had more confidence in our political leaders because they actually earned it from time to time.

When my father was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress, both parties fought bitterly with each other.

But when it came time to work out a solution to get the economy moving forward, they sat down and cut deals to lower or simplify taxes and to ease or eliminate onerous regulations.

In the 1990s, the roles were reversed. Clinton was president, Republicans ran Congress and partisanship was fierce. But when they had to do it, the leaders of both parties worked out a way to balance the budget and reform welfare.

In the old days, conservatives and liberals — loyal R’s and die-hard D’s — buried their hatchets and ultimately found a way to work together.

Today, we don’t seem to even want both parties to cooperate. We demonize the other side so much we can’t imagine ever working with them to fix the Capitol Building’s roof, much less the economy.

Fast-forward to 2012. Does anyone have confidence in our leaders to work together to pull the Supertanker of State off the reef, much less turn it around?

We know what makes America work better for everyone today and in the future — or we used to. It’s when government is smaller and the private sector is bigger, not vice versa.

The American people have lost confidence in their leaders for good reasons. Politicians from both parties in Washington have to join to clean up the economic mess they created or that confidence will never be restored.

If they don’t do it soon, being ranked No. 16 on The Economist’s “best place to be born” index will look pretty good to our grandkids.

November 30, 2012

Once considered to be one of the worlds most desirable countries to live in, the United States of America was rated a dismal 16 in the worlds most desirable place to live survey.

Research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a subsidiary of The Economist, has revealed that Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Finland and Switzerland are considered to be more desirable places to live than the once mighty United States of America.

Switzerland, the country that was considered to be the best place to live and be born, fared much higher than the United States when respondents were asked about their quality of life…

Interestingly though, it has only taken the United States of America 12 years to fall from #1 in 1998 as the best place to live.

So why has the United States fallen from it’s pedestal?

1. The economic recovery promised by the United States Government from the recent Global Financial Crisis has not eventuated. Countries like Australia and Canada either did not bear the full brunt of the GFC and recovered much quicker from the GFC than the United States did.

November 29, 2012

Republicans had better learn from history — and from Ronald Reagan’s mistake.

President Obama and his fellow big-spenders in Congress are promising if they get higher tax rates today they’ll make even higher spending cuts tomorrow.

It’s an old sucker’s game. Republicans — and the rest of the country — should know it by now, because for three decades we’ve all been suckers.

If history is our guide, and Republicans in Congress don’t grow a spine, by this time next year we’ll have higher taxes, higher spending, more debt and a bigger government.

Twice before, Republicans have been fooled into playing the Democrats’ con game.

It happened to my father early in his first term when he sought to close a growing federal deficit caused by the deep economic recession. He believed Democrats in Congress would keep their pledge to make $3 in future spending cuts for every $1 in immediate tax increases.

In 1982 he signed a compromise tax bill with the horrible name of TEFRA — the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act. And, when those promised spending cuts never materialized in Congress, TEFRA became one of the biggest regrets of my father’s presidency.

My father was duped by the duplicity of Democrats. And so was George H.W. Bush less than a decade later, when he foolishly allowed himself to be taken for the same ride.

In 1990′s budget wrangling, which was aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit by $500 billion over five years, Bush 41 was seduced by the Democrats’ promise of making $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes.

The first Bush fell for it completely, reneging on his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge, opening the door for “tax-cutter” Ross Perot and losing in 1992 to Bill Clinton.

Even before he was de-elected, Bush 41 regretted the “bargain” he had made with Democrats. In March of 1992, the sucker in chief said, “I thought this one compromise — and it was a compromise — would result in no more tax increases.

“I thought it would result in total control of domestic discretionary spending. And now we see Congress talking about raising taxes again. So, I’m disappointed, and given all of that, yes, (it was) a mistake.”

Fast-forward to “Nightmare on Obama Street, Part II.” We have trillion-dollar federal deficits as far as our children’s eyes can see. We have an economy that’s looking at four more years of low growth and higher taxes.

And now some Republicans in Congress — who apparently don’t have a piece of conservative cartilage left in their bodies — are getting ready to be duped again.

What’s that old saying? “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Well, Republicans look like they are about to be fooled for the third time, which is so stupid there’s no adage to describe it.

While my father was bargaining with Democrats in 1982 over spending and tax cuts, he spoke over the heads of Congress to the American people.

“In a few days the Congress will stand at the fork of two roads,” he said. “One road is all too familiar to us. It leads ultimately to higher taxes. It merely brings us full circle back to the source of our economic problems, where the government decides that it knows better than you what should be done with your earnings and, in fact, how you should conduct your life. The other road promises to renew the American spirit. It’s a road of hope and opportunity. It places the direction of your life back in your hands where it belongs.”

America is at that same fork in the road today. Twice in 30 years Republicans have let Democrat promises lead them and the country down a one-way road to bigger and bigger government.

Double shame on us. And if the GOP allows itself to be suckered again, it won’t be just another disaster for conservatism, it’ll be a tragedy for the whole country.

November 23, 2012

Unless it gets its head and its heart straight, the party might never win the popular vote or the White House again.

The GOP today is not my father’s party.

And until the hierarchy of the GOP stops talking about how great Ronald Reagan was and starts embracing what he really stood for, the party of conservatism is destined for the ash heap of history.

Ronald Reagan was somebody who believed in inclusion, not exclusion. He found a way to reach out to all voting groups, which is why he was the last Republican presidential candidate to win the Hispanic vote.

The GOP in 2012 reminds me of the state of disarray it was in during the mid-1960s.

It was so bad for Republicans in California then that they held a special convention and invited the state’s Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, Jesse Unruh, to come and tell them what was wrong with them.

Unruh came and was blunt: The GOP had no vision and no message for voters, because they didn’t know who they were or what they stood for.

Those pre-Ronald Reagan Republicans got the message. They left that convention, turned their fortunes around, and ended up with Ronald Reagan in the governor’s chair.

Today’s national GOP needs the same kind of turnaround, and the process starts with fixing the party’s inclusion problem with Hispanic, black and Asian voters.

Last week I spoke to a room of 400 conservatives. The only blacks in the room were serving us breakfast. There were only a couple Hispanics — in Florida.

That’s not inclusive. Republicans have got to find a way to reach out to these communities.

I told those conservatives in Florida a story about a young man who as a child came to the United States illegally with his parents in the early 1980s.

He became an American citizen in 1986 when my father signed into law the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty to 3 million illegal residents and made them citizens.

When he turned 18, to thank the United Stares for allowing him to become a citizen, he joined the Navy to serve his new country.

When the USS Ronald Reagan was home porting in San Diego, he volunteered to serve on the ship named after the president who allowed him to become a citizen. Now he mentors 275 sailors on that aircraft carrier and is working on his master’s degree.

There are a thousand stories like that that nobody wants to tell when Republicans talk about immigration.

The GOP has got to find a message of inclusion instead of “Get the hell out of my country.” That’s what Hispanics and other immigrants hear from the Republican Party — “Get out.”

We have to attract immigrants to the GOP, not repel them. We have to do it with more than words every two or four years. And we can’t do what Mitt Romney did.

He came to California, held a fundraiser, grabbed his money and left. He did nothing to get out the vote or reach out to the Hispanic community.

Romney wasn’t going to carry California. But we lost three good incumbents in close congressional races in the state on Nov. 6 — Mary Bono Mack, Dan Lundgren and Brian Bilbray.

Why did we lose those seats? Because only 29 percent of registered voters in California are Republican. And why is that? Because the GOP lacks a vision. Because it lacks a message.

If the GOP is to survive and get this country back on track, it has to regain its Reaganesque vision and make its message more caring and welcoming to immigrants.

The Republican Party has to reach out to the Hispanic, black, Asian and other communities and become involved with them — and do it every day from now on.

Until that happens, the GOP is going to have lots more Thanksgivings with less and less to give thanks for.

November 15, 2012

Now I think it’s time for Republicans to start blaming George W. for the next four years.

For a week we’ve been pinning last week’s debacle on everything from Mitt Romney’s moderation to low Republican turnout.

But the most important Republican who didn’t turn out to support Romney this fall was George W. Bush.

You can make an honest argument that G.W. was as much to blame as anyone else for our being unable to defeat an incompetent incumbent of historic proportions.

For four years Barack Obama has blamed the Great Recession on G.W. and used his presidency as his excuse for why the economy is taking so long to get fixed.

And where’s G.W. been? MIA or AWOL, take your pick.

He didn’t show up at the GOP convention. He didn’t become an enthusiastic surrogate for Romney in a handful of swing states where a few hundred thousand more Republican voters could have changed history. He didn’t stump for senatorial candidates in contested states such as Virginia and Montana.

G.W., the ex-cheerleader, was nowhere to be seen or heard during Romney’s campaign. What’s worse, he didn’t even defend his own economic record. He let the conservatives on talk radio and at Fox News do it.

The trouble is talk radio and Fox only reach about 20 million people during a week – and most of them are already in the conservative Republican choir.

Last I checked, 121 million Americans voted on Election Day. That left us Republicans with 101 million people who still needed to hear our message about who’s really to blame for the broken economy of 2008 to 2012.

We griped and moaned and pointed to Obama, but the mainstream liberal media were too busy protecting their hero to fairly tell our side of the story.

The only way conservatives can get the national news media to deliver our message to the American people is to go over the media’s heads. And the only people who can do that consistently are ex-presidents of the USA.

Bill Clinton became Obama’s best propaganda weapon. When Clinton claimed that no one, not even a super-genius like him, could have solved the economic problem G.W. Bush left Obama within four years, every voter in America heard it.

Even Jimmy Carter was hauled out of mothballs to help the Democrat cause.

The 2012 campaign was all about “the economy, stupid.” Obama blamed G.W. and Republicans. Plus, he had Clinton and Carter bashing G.W.’s record with their bully sticks every day and countering Romney’s arguments that Obama was to blame.

We should have had G.W. standing up and saying, “This is bull. I’m tired of this. This is what I did or did not do with the economy as president. The real culprits are Dodd & Frank and four years of Obama’s failed policies.”

Instead G.W. stayed quiet, even on the issue of Benghazi. Because he refused to show up and defend himself and his record, the Republican Party had to take arrows for him and we lost our second presidential election in a row.

The question I’d like to ask my fellow conservative Republicans is, if G.W. isn’t willing to stand up for his own presidency, why the heck should we?